As a result of the decentralization reform, Municipalities have received increasing number of competencies from the central government, which generated immense volume of responsibilities and tasks for the Municipalities, however, setting the grounds for a number of public services to be locally delivered to citizens.

Under conditions of lack of sufficient financial, administrative and HR capacities, especially smaller Municipalities, face difficulties to autonomously implement the assigned tasks and efficiently deliver public services.

To overcome some of the existing deficiencies, the Municipalities can enter and do enter, into Inter-municipal cooperation arrangements/partnerships and thus facilitate their economies of scale and provide higher quality and more efficient services for the citizens.

Inter-municipal Cooperation (IMC) can be defined as an arrangement between two or more local authorities for accomplishing common goals, providing a service or tackling with a mutual problem.

The IMC is regulated with the newly adopted Law on Inter-municipal Cooperation.